A Promising Start
This story is so full of promise. And you do have some talent as a writer. Carter's character reminds me a good deal of Harden from After and Noah Flynn from The Kissing Booth. His side comments about her strike me though, since it appears to be building to them going into a relationship. I do applaud how this story is taking a slow, natural approach to their relationship since they started out as enemies and in real life they won't jump to friends. Maybe friends with benefits, but not friends. The progression through a lot of it feels real, and the characters are very believable at times. Especially Taylor. She breaks the mold usually used for female protagonist in where she is this pristine golden girl who's never had sex, and looks bad upon those who are rumored to. I also like the diversity shown between your characters so far since not everyone is straight in real life, or even in a single friend group. Some of the struggles shown - like with Jake's struggle with coming out and doing so on his own terms - is like what many high schoolers around the world struggle with. Many can relate to some of their struggles. But what seemed random was the two uses of third person when the entire story is done in first. It can work if it's consistent and not twice. Your side relationships like between Caleb and Jake are progressing, and have been done well. I do stand by the belief that building a strong and believable side relationships show how strong an author is and can be. However, this is more my opinion, I do not see how Carter can say all the things he does to her and then kiss her. I get the enemies thing, but some of the things he says are cruel. I would like to see a potential arc for him, and then if your goal is to hook them up, which it seems like it is, then it would seem a little more believable as such.
There are quite a bit of grammatical and punctuation issues. Mostly with missing commas and too many run on sentences. There are also some missplaced commas. And some of the sentence structure creates some potential misscommunication and confusion. A good tool is Grammarly, which has a free option, or get an editor who can help you with the editing process. Another thing, try to show more rather than tell. There is some good instances of showing, but detail is your friend when you write. Try to add more detail surrounding apperance of the characters and even feelings and setting. There were quite a few telling sentences that were choppy and created more confusion than actual detail. Also, some of your events lacked build up, which created more of a feeling it was plucked out of thin air. It can be fixed in editing. It's a first draft, there will be errors and it's okay.
I absolutely will read on, and can't wait for your next update. I hope Taylor gets the ending she deserves along with the rest of her friends like Capeb, Chris, Jake, Ben, Cass, Sarah and even her frenemy Carter. You've got some talent as a writer and you can only go up from here. Sorry I wrote a book for the review, oops, but i do hope it helped and was informative. Keep up the good work! Keep writing!
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